LD Resources

© Dale Susan Brown

Author’s Note:
This story was published in 1983 as part of the Independent Living Ideas Series of the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. It describes how I founded Association of Learning Disabled Adults and obtained my job, which I ended up retiring from twenty five years later.

Some of it’s points about “marketing yourself” are timeless, but it is my hope that the readers find the struggles of the dyslexic with a now old-fashioned typewriter an interesting relic of the past.

Please forgive the use of the work “handicapped” In those days, that’s what everyone said.

Introduction
Why would you want to “market”your disability? Perhaps because you belong to a disability organization, a consumer group, which has not made much of an impact on your community. Perhaps because you’d like your legislators to know more about your disability and the needs you have, or that other people with your disability have. Perhaps you want to reach the teachers in your community, to help them understand their students with your disability. Perhaps you’d like more businesses in your community to consider people with your disability an important consumer of their goods, products, and services.

Why would you want to “market” yourself? Perhaps you’d like a job, or a better job, or a job in a new field. Perhaps you’d like to be more involved in your community and play a more active role. Perhaps you’d like to get more education, but you need to convince the local schools that you can do the work.

Marketing can help. The first step is planning: what it is that you want. The next step is research, knowing all about what it is that you want to market. A next step is to identify the needs that your disability group or you have. Another is to identify specific audiences that you are interested in reaching: teachers, doctors, employers, professionals, other organizations of disabled people, other disabled people, legislators, people in the media. A final and vital step is what you can offer others.

The following “case study” may give you some ideas on marketing your disability…and yourself.

Case Study
I really started out marketing myself unconsciously. I was initially concerned with learning disability, and the fact that people with learning disabilities had a disability which did not officially exist at the time I started.

PLANNING. When I formed the Association of Learning Disabled Adults in 1978, most professionals insisted that learning disability is something that we outgrow as we mature. Additionally, learning disability is “invisible.” Thus, we couldn’t identify each other in order to organize, so we chose to use a marketing strategy to locate potential members.

RESEARCH. My first step was to contact the professionals who helped learning disabled children. I suspected that learning disabled adults may have contacted these professionals.

I obtained a list from our local handicapped information center and began telephoning. To my surprise, several of these professionals were working with learning disabled adults but thought that they were the only professional in the area doing so. Some professionals had turned learning disabled adults away, and were unaware that others were working with them. One professional told me that she herself was a learning disabled adult. All of them were interested and encouraging amazing given the fact that the official “professional” line at the time was that learning disabilities were outgrown.

I asked each professional if there was anyone else I should call. I called these new contacts too. Each telephone call was followed up with a letter. I wrote a pamphlet and enclosed it with each letter. Soon, I was hearing form learning disabled adults and from the parents of learning disabled adults.

Within a month, I had heard from enough learning disabled adults to hold the first meeting of Association of Learning Disabled Adults.

I wrote a press release. No matter how small an organization or budget, it is essential to produce neat press releases. Unfortunately, with my particular learning disability, typing a neat press release is not easy. I had to center the release using a ruler and pencil, since my eyes can’t judge distance and spacing, and I kept on drawing the pencil line too hard or I would erase a hole in the paper. After I got it centered, I had trouble typing accurately and seeing my mistakes. The last straw was that press releases ended with “- 30-”and I couldn’t get that centered either. When I got it centered, I kept on leaving out one of the dashes or writing “03.” It was 1:00 a.m. before I finally got the press release typed and I was tempted to tell the press that I wanted to handwrite future press releases.

It was worth the effort. Nine out of thirteen of the papers which received the release announced the meeting. The Washington Post and the Montgomery County (MD) Journal called me to arrange interviews.

ACTION. Mmm, interviews. It was necessary to make some decisions on exactly what kind of public image to project. I had to choose goals. I decided that the public needs to know:

What a learning disability is; That a learning disability is not necessarily outgrown; That a learning disability can cause problems on the job and in everyday activity; That a learning disability is a “handicap,” not a personal weakness, a sign of mental incapacity, or another word for “stupid;” That like all handicaps, a learning disability can be overcome and a learning disabled person can lead a productive, independent and joyous life; That a learning disabled people should come to a self-help group meeting if they would like to meet others with the similar problems.

I stuck to these goals and the feature stories were outstanding. The group grew and we began to attract about 40 people to meetings. It expanded faster than we could keep up with. I had to take the phone off the hook in order to eat.

The success of this marketing strategy in organizing the Association of Learning Disabled Adults gave me the idea of looking for a job where I could use my skills in public relations. I also decided to use a marketing strategy in selling myself to potential employers. I read Richard Bolles book “What Color is Your Parachute?” for job hunting techniques and found that one method is to study the places you want to work, meet the people in the position to hire, and interview them for information rather than as a job applicant.

As I wanted to use my education and public relations talents in an organization concerned with disabled people, I began to call on both private and Government agencies with programs for handicapped people to talk about the Association of Learning Disabled Adults. Like the press reaction to my release, my reception by these agencies was warm, welcoming and interested. People were beginning to recognize the need for programs for learning disabled adults and were eager to meet and talk with one who had founded an organization.

One of the groups that I was most interested in was the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. About this time, I read an article by Bob Ruffner, the Committee’s director of communications, which said many of the things about using public relations to build organizations of disabled people which my experience in organizing the Association for Learning Disabled Adults had taught me were valuable. I wrote him a letter and complimented him on his article and he responded by arranging to meet me and to have me interviewed for the Committee magazine Disabled USA.

Before I went to that first meeting, I did my homework. I researched the President’s Committee in the Periodical Guide to Literature in my local public library and read everything written about it. I got copies of the Committee’s radio public service announcements from a friend at a local radio station. I also learned more about the Committee by asking people in other organizations concerned with disabled people about it.

I was learning a valuable lesson: a good public relations campaign of “marketing yourself’ depends on getting out and meeting people. I was making valuable contacts not only for myself and my job search, but also for my organization. Often indeed, people were so interested in the learning disabled adult that it was hard for me to get information about job possibilities! A couple of other organizations asked me to write articles about the Association of Learning Disabled Adults and this gave me even greater visibility among the agencies which work with disabled people and enhanced my marketability for a job.

A job opening was announced at the President’s Committee. I filled out form after form and after five months of being interviewed, of waiting, or refilling forms, of being “certified” by vocational rehabilitation as being genuinely handicapped, of competing against a large number of other qualified men and women and waiting…I got the job!

Today, I’m on the staff of the President’s Committee. My job is to promote opportunities for other disabled people through writing, public speaking, and special events. I love it and I got it by selling myself through public relations.